The Whispers In The Walls

They called me meticulous. A perfectionist, they said, with too keen an eye for detail. But they did not know the truth no one did. If they had understood, truly understood, how that sound had gnawed at my sanity, they might have done as I did. Might have!

It began with the house. I had inherited it from an uncle whose eccentricities were the subject of quiet gossip. A man of odd habits, they said. Reclusive, and peculiar, with a house to match his character high-ceilinged rooms and crooked hallways that seemed to twist just slightly out of sight, as though hiding secrets of their own.

At first, I thought it was nothing. Old houses settle, after all; the timbers groan, and the pipes clatter. But the noise came again, and again. A faint scratching, soft yet persistent, as if the walls themselves were alive.

I searched for the source, tearing up floorboards and prying open-air vents. I suspected mice at first, then something worse a rat, perhaps. But I found nothing. Still, the sound grew louder, and at night, it became unbearable. I could hear it through the plaster, just behind my bed, a scraping rhythm that mocked my efforts to ignore it.

It was not merely the noise it was the pattern. There was intelligence in it, a maddening deliberation that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It would pause when I held my breath, then resume, as if aware of my attention.

I could not sleep. I could not eat. My waking hours became consumed with the search. I stripped wallpaper, dismantled shelves, and drilled into every panel I could reach. The neighbors whispered, their eyes wide with suspicion, but I did not care. Let them think me mad! Let them gossip! They could not hear what I heard.

Then came the whispers.

At first, I thought it my imagination. A trick of the mind, warped by sleepless nights. But no, they were real soft murmurs, unintelligible yet charged with meaning. They came from within the walls, from the very structure of the house.

It spoke to me.

"You know," it said one night, as I lay shivering beneath the covers.

"Know what?" I whispered back, trembling.

"You know what I hide," it hissed.

I sat bolt upright, my heart racing. The voice had shifted closer, clearer. It was no mere noise. It was there, in the house, in the walls.

The next day, I resumed my search with renewed fervor. Hours passed as I clawed at the plaster, my fingernails ragged, my hands bloodied. And then, at last, I found it.

Behind the wall in the sitting room, hidden beneath layers of old boards and insulation, lay a cavity. Inside it, wrapped in a tattered, moth-eaten cloth, was a bundle. My hands shook as I pulled it free, the fabric falling away to reveal a decayed, skeletal hand.

A body. My uncle's? No, it could not be! He had died peacefully or so I had been told. Yet here were his remains, stuffed into the very fabric of his home.

The whispers grew louder, mocking my discovery.

"You see?" they taunted. "You know. You always knew."

I screamed, smashing the skeleton into pieces, and scattering the bones in a frenzy of terror and rage. But even as I did, the whispers did not stop.

I buried the bones beneath the floor, hammering the boards back into place with manic precision. But the house... it knew. The sound persisted, louder now, insistent. The whispers turned to screams, filling every corner of the cursed dwelling.

"You cannot silence me!" it roared. "You cannot hide the truth!"

In a fit of madness, I set the house ablaze. I stood in the street, watching as the flames consumed it, feeling at last a sense of peace. The screams faded, the whispers silenced.

But now, even in the quiet of this rented room, I hear it—the scratching, the murmurs. They are not in the walls anymore; they are in my mind.

I cannot escape them. I cannot escape the truth. For it was not my uncle I found behind the wall.

It was me.